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Just a few weeks after our interview, Waldie told me that Santa Fe Station had closed. Naturally, uniqueness withers in the ‘burbs. Or does it? Donald Waldie has flourished in Lakewood.

– Hilary Kaplan

Tell me a little bit of the story of Lakewood.

Lakewood did represent a significant transformation of American experience in the immediate postwar period. Where previously working-class people had lived in congested factory towns or in big cities, now suddenly they were living in single-family homes in the flats of the L.A. basin. Many people passed through that defining experience. So Lakewood is not by any means an isolated place. It is strangely connected to the larger American transformation of working-class life

For California, Lakewood was partly a model accepted and partly a model rejected. The shopping center became a model for regional shopping centers around Southern California and gradually around the nation. The grid of streets–right-angle streets, no cul-de-sacs–was something that in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, subdividers rejected for what was regarded as a more picturesque and upscale version of cul-de-sacs and curving streets. Curiously, the grid of Lakewood was rediscovered in the late-1980s/early-1990s by the advocates of New Urbanism, who claimed that the cul-de-sacs and curving streets of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s fostered isolation and a lack of community in those suburban neighborhoods, but this right-angle grid of streets would be a better, more convivial plan for a suburban tract.

A place built all at once was settled all at once, so you had 17,000 households formed in Lakewood in less than three years. That had a significant impact on the social dynamics of Lakewood–if you will, the spirit of the place. So many people so suddenly in a community, and all of them relatively young, most of them with families that had three or four children. One of the characteristic features of Lakewood, certainly in its first ten or twelve years, was very large numbers of children. A typical block in Lakewood has 42 houses altogether. Within the span of those 42 houses, you might have had more than a hundred children, ranging in ages from babes in arms to middle schoolers, because there weren’t very many teenagers in the first seven or eight years of the city. There were no elderly people in Lakewood.

Did you feel like that was unusual, that there were so many other kids your age around?

It was, in hindsight, somewhat different from the American experience up ‘til then, but for us it was just what was around us, and therefore completely natural. The relationships between inside the house and outside of the house, between private and public, are very different in that setting, particularly in Southern California where the weather’s good nearly all the time. With your close friends, that might be ten or twelve different people, there was this sense that every mom was your mom, every house was your house. Kids would sort of drift into someone’s house, scour the kitchen for a snack, a drink, a glass of water, some punch, whatever, do something there in the backyard, play a pick-up game, be hustled out by a mom, back into the street to drift into another house. And this would go on all day or all afternoon until early evening. Sadly, there are more expectations about structure in people’s lives [today]. Instead of knocking around the neighborhood, kids are in soccer camp or baseball camp or playing Nintendo. And there’s fewer children, [though] there are more than there used to be.

How many are there?

The family size in Lakewood is getting larger. It reached its nadir in ‘86. [Now] the very elderly are leaving the community, and the homes are beginning to be transferred to younger families. But then of course, most people don’t have families of three or four anymore. They at the most have a family of two.

So what’s changed in Lakewood?

Well, the grid hasn’t changed. The small houses on small lots haven’t changed. The relationship among the elements of the plan, of the landscapes, have not changed. The social dynamic implied by the physical layout of Lakewood hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the complexion of the people who live here, the age scaling–very young to very old now–and the demands on social capital of the high cost of owning and maintaining a house in Lakewood and bringing up a family. In the past a single wage-earner in Lakewood could raise a family, but now household ownership and a family absolutely requires two incomes for working-class people.

Is Lakewood mostly working-class?

Well, I say that. There’s kind of a, if you will, the “hands” test: lots of men and women in Lakewood, when they work, they get their hands dirty. OK? They may not be riveting jets together, but they’re doing something else. And then the operational definition of working-class: if two or more people in your neighborhood regularly park their car on their lawn, you don’t live in a middle-class neighborhood.

In your new book, in the “About the Author,” it says that you live a “not-quite-middle-class” life. What does that mean?

Lakewood residents have a collection of values that intersects with many middle-class values. But they have some values that don’t intersect. Lakewood suggests to me certain social relationships that are more communitarian in nature than what I imagine contemporary middle-class values to be. There is in Lakewood a willingness to rub shoulders with other people in a way that I don’t regard as being wholly middle-class. People in Lakewood are obliged to be more in each other’s lives because the houses are small on small lots, narrow streets. It’s not possible to create the kind of island of retreat or repose that I imagine in more middle middle-class places. If your house is on a quarter of an acre in a Cincinnati suburb, you’re less in your neighbor’s life in some ways than you are on a 5,000-square-foot lot in Lakewood.

And they don’t, to my mind, have the economic security that settled members of the middle middle-class, if you will, have. More Lakewood residents live paycheck to paycheck.

So there are different kinds of suburbs.

There’s not-quite-middle-class suburbs and there’s middle-class suburbs and there are upper-class suburbs too. And there are impoverished suburbs. And I think a mistake that critics of suburban places make is imagining all suburban places to be virtually alike.

Do you feel like you’re a defender of the suburbs?

Oh yes. Naturally some people misunderstand Holy Land [his 1997 memoir] and think of it as a kind of ironic criticism, but in fact Holy Land is an argument. It’s an argument about disregarding places, and it’s an argument about why a disregarded place, an ordinary place, an everyday place, why it can in fact harbor qualities of life that are profound.

Beginning in the late-1940s with the development of Levittown and continuing all the way until today, there’s a certain puritan strain in American culture that is contemptuous of, furious with, suburban places. There’s a writer, James Howard Kunstler, who wrote Geography of Nowhere and several other books, and he’s one of the polemicists for the New Urbanism. A few years ago he entitled a keynote speech to the assembled New Urbanist followers, “The Place Where Evil Dwells.” And he was talking about places like Lakewood. That enormous weight of contempt and fury and disappointment and regret about suburban places meant that a book like Holy Land had to be a–had to steathily make its way in a world where those views predominate. It’s not a standard memoir.

So what does the future hold for Lakewood?

The future of Lakewood is going to be very much like the past of Lakewood, except the actors will be as diverse and different as Southern Californians are generally. Working people looking for a first home are still buying houses in Lakewood, except they happen to be people of color as opposed to the Anglos that by de jure and de facto segregation bought houses in 1951, ‘52, and ‘53. That’s what interests me, is how the experience of Lakewood will touch or not touch these new actors in the story. I want to see what working people make of this place given the intersection of their lives and the physical structure of it. They’ve changed, the family structure has changed, the way men and women relate to each other has changed, the dynamics of education, all of that has changed, but the physical plan hasn’t changed. I think there’s something about the physical plan that has at least some shaping power over lives. I want to see how that works out next.

What about the homes? Are people remodeling, adding on?

People are in fact remodeling their Lakewood homes, but typically remodeling doesn’t mean tearing down and building a McMansion on the lot. [It means adding] on an extra bedroom and bath to the two- and three-bedroom homes with one bath. Lakewood is not a place where people have bought in to tear down the houses and build some other kind of house. The fabric of Lakewood remains essentially the same.

Tell me a little bit about your new book.

My new book is a collection of writings for various publications that go back to around 1995 and continue forward to early 2004. I try to wrestle with issues of place–but scale them up to a larger container: the region called L.A. or the county called Los Angeles or the city called L.A. I’m struggling to find ways of articulating how one can be loyal to one’s neighborhood, which nearly everyone is–you ask people, no matter where they live in Southern California, if they like their neighborhood, and if they don’t live actively in a gang war zone, they like their neighborhood. Can you scale up from that neighborhood to a regional loyalty within something as large and as amorphous as Southern California? I don’t know if that can be done, but I’m just finding out and thinking about that issue. I think place loyalty is a very critical element in solving a great many of our overwhelming public policy problems.

Talk about loyalty, you’re kind of an unusual example of loyalty to place. Here you are in Lakewood, and here you’re going to stay. Or so it seems.

Well, I’m by no means unique. There are about 23/24 percent of Lakewood residents have lived here twenty years or longer. I’ve lived here my entire life. I’m nearly 56. But I’m by no means unique even in that.

What made you stay?

I guess, well lots of reasons, some good, some bad. In part I stayed stuck because of my disabilities [impaired vision]. In part I stayed stuck because of my obligations to my parents, because I ended up being the primary caregiver in their last illnesses. In part I stuck because what I got from Lakewood satisfied me. Lakewood was, is, adequate to the demands of my desire. What I longed for was all around me. For many people that doesn’t work, and the national mythology is it never works. The national mythology is not always right. I’m very skeptical of an American ethos which is driven by the remote control. Don’t like you–click. Don’t like that–click. Don’t like this–click. I don’t see life that way. [Lakewood’s] not perfect, not right, not the best thing; it’s just a sense of myself that I find more satisfying than the clicker or the remote control alternative.

And I also stuck because I acquired the ability, the grace, to think of myself as a teller of stories about the place where I live.

And you felt the best way to do that is to be here?

I felt that the stories and the place were materially connected, which is certainly not true of most American writers, who tend to live somewhere and write about somewhere else.

I think of writers about urban places like Moshe Safdie, who writes about cities as temporary encampments. I’m suggesting that perhaps one of the ways to look at the next American city might be to look at the last American city and see in the fabric of its everydayness some things of permanence to stand against the conviction that everything around us is a temporary encampment.

But we’re in the ‘burbs. This isn’t the city.

This is the city. It’s all the city you’re gonna get in Los Angeles. Lakewood’s about seven-units-per-acre development is as dense as a great many cities in the United States. It’s not as dense as midtown Manhattan, but no place is, except Maywood [a suburb of Los Angeles]. The moderately dense uniform development of Los Angeles County and much of Southern California between the ocean and the mountains is as urban as this region will ever get. No one is going to bulldoze 9 1/2 square miles of Lakewood to build a denser community. It is inconceivable that that will ever happen.

Why? No one wants it?

Because there are no economic forces that would make it profitable to buy 17,000 Lakewood homes and build something else. An earthquake could do that, a nuclear war could do that, a tyrannical government could do that, but there’s no economic forces that are going to tear down 17,500 houses and then build something else on the lots. And there’s certainly no political will in a place like Lakewood to do that. Who would agree to do that?

I guess I wasn’t thinking of 17,000 houses, but would someone take down a few and put up apartments or–

Where density might appear is by stealth, in the building of accessory units at the rear of existing homes in Lakewood. So-called “granny flats,” which no granny lives in. They’re generally lived in by immigrant people. Or what might happen to densify Lakewood would be mixed-use development, where retail areas are morphed into retail on the ground floor and multifamily on the second and third floors.

I wanted to ask you a question related to your writings about living alone. When we think of the American suburb, we think that it’s populated by families. Are there a lot of single people in Lakewood?

Well, most of them are older. I, as a middle-aged man living alone, I’m probably fairly unusual. I certainly wouldn’t make any claims about my lifestyle as being anything more than a mildly anomalous one. It’s the life I got, I guess, at the moment.

Do you every try to go on dates in Lakewood?

Well, [PAUSE] yeah, um, there’s not much of a nightlife in Lakewood. [Chuckle] I don’t fit in well with expectations that people have about–some people might have about a single man’s life, for lots of reasons, from upbringing, cultural background, physical realities of who I am, doubtlessly the warped nature of my psyche. I am a single man without paralyzing regrets.

If you want to meet someone in Lakewood, do you have to go on the Internet?

No. There are a lot of bars in Lakewood!

Do you think it’s a good place to grow up?

[Suddenly serious] I know it’s a good place to grow up, strangely enough. I’m very close to my goddaughter, Catherine, [who] will be eleven in two days and her older sister is fourteen. And although their experience of Lakewood, the texture of life in Lakewood, is significantly different from mine, there’s enough in their neighborhood–enough of the safety, enough of the conviviality, enough of the being in public and being in private–that they seem to have gotten something from the experience. But you have to be a little less anxious. Lakewood is not a place of anxious striving. It’s not a place where people worry about where they are going to go next. It’s a place where people worry more about where they might fall down to. The American myth is that all of this was delivered to us by men and women driven by anxious striving. And their anxious striving delivered a place where people who are not anxious strivers can lead ordinary lives. An interesting irony. I don’t know–should the next American city be a place of anxious striving or should it be a place of desire satisfied? Should the next American city be a place where people want to leave, or people want to stay?

In your day job, you’re the public information officer for the city.

Yes. I’m a professional storyteller. My job is to tell Lakewood’s story to Lakewood. And also to tell it to reporters. I do that typically these days by writing. Although years ago I could think of me as a one-person public relations firm.

It’s very unusual in American culture for people in city governments to also be literary authors.

Indeed. But more likely in South America and Africa as well. A long tradition of public servants being also serious writers. Well, I’m doing my bit for American culture!

Do you ever want to just be a writer?

Well, I’m sure that’s going to happen. I’m almost 56. I’m looking at how the next few years can be structured so that retirement will allow me to spend much more time writing. And so a different kind of life is ahead of me in the next few years.

I’m pretty serious now that when I get to be incapable of writing a convincing editorial piece in the L.A. Times, I’m going to just end up my writing career translating all of Mallarmé. I don’t know if I’ll do a very good job at it, but it’ll fill those days. There’ve been a lot of Mallarmé translations, but you need to retranslate stuff every few years just because translations date very quickly. That’s a goal.

Think you’re going to do that here in Lakewood?

Well, I have no immediate plans to strip-mine the equity out of my house and go someplace else. Will they carry me out of my house one day in a pine box? I don’t know. It’s kind of a sweet notion that D.J. Waldie will live and die in Lakewood. But I don’t really have very many sweet notions about myself, so I’m not sentimental about my future at all. I’m not sentimental about much of anything.

REFERENCES

Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. See also: www.kunstler.com

Some contemporary Suburban SoCal poetry:

Tu, Hung Q. Structures of Feeling. San Francisco: Krupskaya, 2003.

Waldie, D. J. Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Waldie, D. J. Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles. L.A.: Angel City Press, 2004.

A documentary about “automobility” in Los Angeles:

“Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles.” Dir. Julian Cooper. 1974.

This article appeared in the January 2005 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!